Solari: Hallucination-Reduced Vision Language Model

Solari is a 500M parameter vision-language model fine-tuned for reduced hallucination on real-world images. Built on SmolVLM2-500M-Video-Instruct, Solari uses QLoRA + Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) on the RLAIF-V dataset to align the model toward more faithful visual descriptions.

Model Details

Model Description

Solari targets hallucination reduction in vision-language tasks, with a focus on improving reliability for accessibility applications (e.g., assisting visually impaired users). The model was trained using parameter-efficient fine-tuning (QLoRA) with DPO to learn preferences between accurate and hallucinated image descriptions, achieving improved hallucination benchmarks while preserving general VLM capabilities.

• Developed by: Cubex11
• Model type: Vision-Language Model (Image-Text-to-Text)
• Language(s): English
• License: Apache-2.0
• Finetuned from: HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM2-500M-Video-Instruct

Model Sources

• Base Model: SmolVLM2-500M-Video-Instruct
• Training Dataset: RLAIF-V (Formatted) — 72K AI-generated preference pairs for hallucination reduction

Uses

Direct Use

Solari can be used for image understanding tasks where factual accuracy is critical:

• Describing real-world scenes for visually impaired users
• Visual question answering with reduced hallucination
• Image captioning with improved object recognition reliability

Out-of-Scope Use

• Tasks requiring strong mathematical reasoning or code understanding (degraded from base model)
• Non-English language tasks
• Medical or safety-critical applications without additional validation

How to Get Started with the Model

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForImageTextToText, AutoProcessor
from PIL import Image
import requests

model_id = "Cubex11/Solari"
model = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained(
    model_id,
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
    device_map="auto",
)
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_id)

# Load an image (replace with your own image path or URL)
image = Image.open("your_image.jpg").convert("RGB")

# Create prompt
messages = [
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {"type": "image"},
            {"type": "text", "text": "Describe this image in detail."}
        ]
    }
]

text = processor.apply_chat_template(messages, add_generation_prompt=True)
inputs = processor(text=text, images=[[image]], return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
output = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=256)
trimmed = output[0][len(inputs.input_ids[0]):]
print(processor.decode(trimmed, skip_special_tokens=True))

Training Details

Training Data

RLAIF-V (Formatted) — a large-scale multimodal preference dataset containing ~72K preference pairs. Each sample includes an image, a prompt, a chosen response (more accurate), and a rejected response (more hallucinated). Preferences are generated by open-source AI models following the RLAIF-V methodology.

Training Procedure

Method: QLoRA + Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)

The base model was quantized to 4-bit (NF4) and fine-tuned using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with DPO to learn preferences between accurate and hallucinated responses.

Training Hyperparameters

Speeds, Sizes, Times

• Training time: ~9 hours on NVIDIA L4 (24GB)
• Best checkpoint: Step 2500 (selected by lowest validation loss)
• Model size: ~1 GB (bf16 safetensors)

Evaluation

Testing Data, Factors & Metrics

Evaluated using VLMEvalKit on 8 standard benchmarks covering hallucination, general VLM capability, and real-world understanding.

Metrics

• POPE: F1 score across random/popular/adversarial splits (object hallucination)
• AMBER: Attribute, Existence, Relation accuracy (multi-dimensional hallucination)
• HallusionBench: aAcc, fAcc, qAcc (hallucination detection)
• A-OKVQA: Accuracy on outside-knowledge VQA
• MME: Perception and Reasoning scores
• MMStar: Multi-modal reasoning accuracy
• MMBench: General multi-modal understanding
• RealWorldQA: Real-world image understanding accuracy

Results

Summary

Solari improves on 7 out of 8 benchmarks compared to the base model:

• POPE recall +8.60% — dramatically better at recognizing objects actually present in images
• All hallucination benchmarks improved — POPE, AMBER, and HallusionBench
• General capabilities preserved or improved — A-OKVQA, MMStar, MMBench, RealWorldQA all show gains
• Trade-off on MME — perception score dropped ~98 points, primarily on counting (-26.7), position (-26.7), and code reasoning (-27.5) subtasks due to the model becoming more conservative

Bias, Risks, and Limitations

• Counting and spatial reasoning degraded: The DPO alignment made the model more conservative, reducing performance on fine-grained counting and positional reasoning tasks (reflected in MME scores).
• Small model capacity: At 500M parameters, the model has inherent limitations on complex reasoning tasks.
• English only: The model was trained and evaluated only on English-language tasks.
• Training data bias: RLAIF-V preferences are AI-generated, which may introduce systematic biases.

Recommendations

• Best suited for binary object recognition tasks ("Is there a X?") and general scene description
• For tasks requiring precise counting or spatial reasoning, consider using the base model or a larger VLM
• Always validate outputs in safety-critical applications

Environmental Impact

• Hardware Type: NVIDIA L4 (24GB)
• Hours used: ~9 hours
• Cloud Provider: Lightning AI
• Compute Region: US

Technical Specifications

Model Architecture and Objective

• Architecture: SmolVLM2 (ViT vision encoder + LLM decoder with multi-modal projector)
• Parameters: ~500M total
• Objective: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) — learns to prefer accurate descriptions over hallucinated ones

Compute Infrastructure

Hardware

NVIDIA L4 GPU (24GB VRAM) on Lightning AI

Software

• Transformers
• TRL (DPO Trainer)
• PEFT (QLoRA)
• BitsAndBytes (4-bit quantization)

Citation

BibTeX:

@misc{solari2026,
    title={Solari: Hallucination-Reduced Vision Language Model via QLoRA DPO on RLAIF-V},
    author={Cubex11},
    year={2026},
    url={https://huggingface.co/Cubex11/Solari}
}

Acknowledgments

• HuggingFace for SmolVLM2 and the RLAIF-V formatted dataset
• OpenBMB for the RLAIF-V and RLHF-V research
• Lightning AI for compute resources
• OpenCompass for the VLMEvalKit evaluation toolkit